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It felt like a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers movie. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this person explained using generative AI for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Internally, though, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Red Flags: AI Use.

Many individuals have usual relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help people? What if I only use it as a editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Minor Turn-Off Turns Into a Moral Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for harmless tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; lonely, detached people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your personal ease outweigh the societal harm it can cause?

How ChatGPT Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

It seems ChatGPT has found a way to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A good friend recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to see myself establishing a meaningful bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes concentration and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your relationship preference actually aligns with your life objectives.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular tasks but is not endorse it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached her complaining about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She dreams about going into her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a laziness”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

A recent friend’s split was particularly ugly. She sided with one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not manage it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for the routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly skeptical. “I am not sure if I would think differently about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You don’t need to rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Figures and Tech Professionals Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use generative AI, it made headlines. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. Ditto still for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others make statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

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